1. Field
The described embodiments relate to computing devices. More specifically, the described embodiments relate to a mediated data exchange between sandboxed applications executing on a computing device.
2. Related Art
Some operating systems for computing devices support “sandboxing.” Sandboxing is a technique that is used to prevent applications executing on a computing device from maliciously or mistakenly altering data (e.g., files) and/or misusing computational resources on the computing device. When “sandboxed,” an application is permitted by the operating system to access only a limited set of resources in the computing device and is prevented from accessing data other than the application's own data. Thus, for example, in these computing devices, the application is allowed to freely access (i.e., read from, write to, delete, etc.) the application's own files, but the application is blocked by the operating system from accessing files belonging to other applications.
Although sandboxing is useful for preventing applications from maliciously or mistakenly altering data and/or misusing computational resources on the computing device, sandboxing significantly limits interactions between applications. For example, although being able to create and/or modify its own files, a sandboxed application is unable to communicate those files to another application or to receive files from another application. Placing such limits on the interactions for sandboxed applications can frustrate users, who are accustomed to non-sandboxed applications that can communicate freely. To avoid frustrating users, designers have provided workarounds to enable sandboxed applications to interact with other applications. For example, designers have added customized program code to one or both of the sandboxed application and the other application, as well as the operating system, to enable rudimentary interactions between a given sandboxed application and one other application. However, existing workarounds require that application program code and/or operating system code be modified on a case-by-case basis to enable the workarounds.
Throughout the figures and the description, like reference numerals refer to the same figure elements.